Category: Open Source Software

Now there is a Reference Cheat Sheet for Fedora 13 Goddard to help newbies (or maybe a few experienced users as well? ) at Digitizor. The cheat sheet list the commonly used commands for Fedora so that you can get up and running in no time.

The Cheat Sheet lists the commands that you will need related to privileges, system services, firewall, network, display, package management etc.

The KOffice team has just announced the release of KOffice 2.2. This is the first KOffice release since version 2.1 was released almost six months ago. Although Open Office still rules, KOffice is also starting to get noticed and improve now that Nokia has choosen it to be their mobile office viewer.

Anyway here are the major changes that KOffice 2.2 brings:

Kexi is back: Kexi, the data management application, is back in KOffice with a completely new user interface. Kexi was last released in KOffice 1.6 so the new version has seen over 3 years of developement.

New Import Filters For MS OOXML Format: KOffice has received new (although basic) import filters for the Microsoft XML based office formats that are used in MS Office 2007 and later.

Stability: KOffice 2.2 has received many enhancements to the layout engine, the libraries and the filters. KOffice 2.2 has much more features and stability as compared to KOffice 2.1.

Apple has more than once, boasted about the hardware data encryption used on its flagship iPhone. The hardware encryption uses a 256-bit AES and is an in your face feature as it cannot be disabled by users even if they want to.

An iPhone can be connected to a PC just like any other device though the connection requires the standard methods of authentication by a passcode and an initial pairing. Further, connecting a locked iPhone to a computer is also not possible.

However, all this falls under common and conventional realms. Bernd Marienfeldt, a security officer at UK internet node LINX, has discovered something interesting treading beyond these boundaries.He saw that if he connected his iPhone to his Ubuntu based system and rebooted it, he could gain a full read/write access to all internal files and folders since Ubuntu auto-mounts the file system. This process does not even require the iPhone to be paired to that computer.

Although Apple has been informed of the matter, it is not sure if they will release a fix to this. Apple has started investigating into the matter and is under the assumption that this is caused by a race condition between the iPhone turning on and it’s file system being identified on USB.

It is funny to see how Apple has always shunned Linux and now, the simplest of the Linux makes its state of the art defense mechanisms look completely stupid.

KDE SC 4.5 has now reached its first beta today for both the desktop and netbook versions. The final release is expected in August this year.

KDE SC 4.5 Beta 1 comes with some new improvements:

New Notification Area – KDE SC 4.5 now has a reworked notification area which creates a uniform look and consistent interaction scheme across applications and toolkits.

KWin – KWin has a new tiling mechanism to automatically place windows next to each other. Advanced graphical effects, such as blurring the background of translucent windows are also included.

WebKit in Konqueror – Users that prefer WebKitover the KHTML rendering engine currently used in Konqueror, now can install the WebKit component and switch Konqueror to use WebKit as rendering engine for web sites.

A notable component missing from this release is KMail, which is being reworked to make use of Akonadi. The new version of KMail will be delivered as part of the monthly bug fix update.

KDE SC 4.5 Beta 1 is not yet available for Ubuntu. We will update as soon as it is available in the Kubuntu Beta PPA.

VideoLanProject has just launched the first release candidate build of VLC 1.1.0, codenamed as The luggage. VideoLanClient is a cross-platform media player, which takes pride in its exhaustive codec support. With the latest release, VLC has once again outpaced its competition by being amongst the first media players to support VP8 and webM.

Another major feature introduced by ‘The luggage’ is extension support. As suggested by its name, extensions are plug-ins that will enable users to extend the basic features present in VLC.

Other improvements include GPU accelerated decoding for smoother playback, improved interface, enhanced avi, mkv and mp4 codecs, improved codec support and support for SFTP protocol. The Windows port also adds Windows 7 taskbar integration, while the Mac port features a new video output module.

Regardless of the few hiccups along the way, Fedora 13, codenamed Goddard, is finally released. This is a significant release both for Fedora and Linux users as a whole as this is probably the first (correct me if I am wrong) mainstream Linux distro to come with Btrfs support.

Accelerated 3D graphics using free drivers – A variety of Nvidia graphics cards can now be 3D enabled to support free software games and an enhanced desktop experience. Of course, the ATI and Intel video cards are still supported.

Enhanced software development and debugging – Fedora 13 includes new support that allows developers working with mixed libraries (Python and C/C++) in Fedora to get more complete information when debugging with gdb.

Expanded Btrfs features – Btrfs has been added as an optional filesystem (not default) with filesystem snapshots capability.

We all know that after acquiring Sun Microsystems, Oracle became the largest open source company around. Red Hat finds this hard to believe and goes to the length of saying that Oracle is not even an open source company.

Paul Cormier, president of products and technologies at Red Hat has claimed that neither Oracle and nor Sun were as involved in open source as Red Hat has been. He goes on to say,

Open is not just seeing the code. Open is also having a community of developers. OpenSolaris is not open. There is no community other than Sun people developing Solaris.

Clearly in the wake of competition, Red Hat is trying to change the very face of open source. Though, whatever Paul said in that statement is correct commercially even though it might not match with the ideology of open source.

Every open-source product is incomplete without a dedicated global community. Additionally, finance is not the only thing that is needed to keep open source software alive.

Clearly, implementing open source as a business is not as easy as it may sound. All eyes are set on the management plan Oracle brings in for Java. This will define a lot of changes as Java is currently the most used platform. (Via: NetworkWorld )

A new version of GCalctool, the default calculator application used in Ubuntu has been released. The new version (5.31.1) has some changes, most notably its speed. It is now faster than Chromium. (Yes the browser. If you do not get it, I suggest you read Jogre Castro’s blog post.)

Here is a list of the changes with GCalctool 5.31.1 :

New color scheme, as you have already seen from the picture above.

It starts really fast.

Keyboard input and accessibility works without any problems.

Although it is supposed to come with Maverick, you can install it from the PPA if you are using Lucid. To do it, open the terminal and execute the following commands: